t_mann

Small nitpick, it's not just the variation in area that you'd care about, but the variation in shape. Two pieces of the same area/volume can cook very differently depending on the shape. The thing is, there isn't a single canonical metric for measuring shape similarity afaik, but you could pick something e.g. based on Hausdorff distance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausdorff_distance#Definition A quick search leads to some cool papers https://webspace.science.uu.nl/~veltk101/publications/art/sm...

I meant 'less markup' (in the sense of a simple ratio of markup characters over total characters). Now you can say that the markup is still fairly low and actually useful. But that goes to my second point of why not just use HTML. This is pretty much exactly what it's been designed for originally.

Sounds a bit like the idea that Bluesky started out with. I don't really get why specifically org mode though, sounds like you could be doing the same thing with a simple Markdown file. And while you're at it, why not just use HTML and read your friends' blogs in the browser?

How about having a synced and editable version of your to-do list on all your devices, including mobile? I've found that to be the main filter for note taking setups. You seem to suggest that there's an emacs plug-in that can handle that?

Great effort, a strong self-hosting community for LLMs is going to be similarly important as the FLOSS movement imho. But right now I feel the bigger bottleneck is on the hardware side rather than software. The amount of fast RAM that you need for decent models (80b+ params) is just not something that's commonly available for consumer hardware right now, not even gaming machines. I heard that Macs (minis) are great for the purpose, but you don't really get them with enough RAM or at prices that don't really qualify as consumer-grade anymore. I've seen people create home clusters (eg using Exo [0]), but I wouldn't really call it practical (single digit token/sec for large models, and the price isn't exactly accessible either). Framework (the modular laptop company) has announced a desktop that can be configured up to 128GB unified RAM, but it's still going to come in at around 2-2.5k depending on your config.

[0] https://github.com/exo-explore/exo

It's a factor, together with high tuition fees, demographic changes, changing attitudes about credentialism (the political tide turning against liberal elite institutions), the cheap 24/7 availability of excellent learning materials online might kill "college as we know it" (in the US). US college is much more than education, it's a lifestyle, with lavish amenities, extracurriculars, varsity sports, all sorts of counselling. It's a bit of an anomaly, most universities globally are much more bare-bone. If US students start value shopping, the US college landscape might start to look more like that.

I agree, but unfortunately the spec authors are already going out and dangling possible bans in front of projects who implement Passkeys in more user-friendly ways:

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407

> To be very honest here, you risk having KeePassXC blocked by relying parties

But having a choice about how you store your credentials shouldn't depend on the good faith of service providers or the spec authors who are doing their bidding anyway. It's a bit similar to sideloading apps, and it should probably be treated similarly (ie, make it a right for users).

Passkeys are in their infancy. You don't go about rolling out such patterns when most users haven't even switched yet and big players like Apple are still resisting attestations (last time I checked). The problem is that the feature is there and can be (ab)-used in this way, so it should be rejected on principle, irrespective of whether it's a problem right now.

I understand the value of attestations in a corporate environment when you want to lock down your employees' devices. But that could simply have been handled through a separate standard for that use case.

Depends on whether we're talking about MOOCs in a narrow sense or online learning more generally.

The problems of Passkeys are more nuanced than just losing access when a device is lost (which actually doesn't need to happen depending on your setup). The biggest problem are attestations, which let services block users who use tools that give them more freedom. Passkeys, or more generally challenge-response protocols, could easily have been an amazing replacement for passwords and a win-win for everyone. Unfortunately, the reality of how they've been designed is that they will mainly serve to further cement the primacy of BigTech and take away user freedom.

> this would be the death of expensive university educations. That obviously didn’t happen

Maybe a bit early to declare that, as the wave of college closures has shown no signs of slowing after the Covid years [0] and is expected to accelerate further [1]?

[0] https://www.2adays.com/blog/college-shutdown-surge-update-th...

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/91245055/higher-education-crisis...

This is a perfect example of how FLOSS is nowadays a truly different type of experience from commercial software: thanks to A/B-tests, software has become so good at manipulating our behavior that it's now often more profitable to optimize software not to be the best at what it's supposed to do but at stealing your time and attention. Ads and (extremely clickbaity) 'news' plastered all over W11 are a prime example, and the exact opposite of what the KDE team are doing here.

Careful, such an approach could easily end up giving an aura of logical objectivity to arbitrarily radical and nonsensical ideas. The political views of one of the fathers of modern logic may serve as a cautionary tale [0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlob_Frege#Political_view...

Isn't fingerprinting covered by GDPR in a similar way to how cookies are? So in theory you should be able to opt out, at least as an EU user.

Great tips, especially the recovery keys. I wouldn't have thought of that, thank you. One question, some distros like Pop OS offer drive encryption as part of the installation process. Do you know whether that would affect the whole disk (and hence could replace Bitlocker) or only the partition it lives on?

Having checked an answer also doesn't guarantee anything with certainty. Which, coincidentally, is the actual topic of the OP, the grading was just a tangential example and not a description of something actually happening anywhere in practice. But sticking with the grading example, the failure modes could be much more benign, such as the examiner failing to spot a mistake, or the answer being copied,...

Probabilities aren't a matter of faith, they're mathematics and as such represent a logical trueism. Your critiques are just nitpicking for the sake of it and void of substance. Have a coffee and leave this topic.

If the questions are randomly chosen, the probability of the true score being 10/100 in that scenario is 10!/(100!/90!) ~ 6e-14

> Even in work environments almost everyone uses chat clients these days.

Maybe in your bubble, but globally this is just false.

This looks like my favorite for installing on relative's PCs before the Windows 10 sunset - I'm just a bit worried about Dual Boot, I've heard some stories about hiccups there. Does anyone have comments about how Dual Boot works with Zorin today, or general experience with that use case?

What is it about traditional calculator UIs that you don't like on mobile? I think they work great, unsurprisingly, since the form factor is similar. I have several (paid) mobile apps that fully emulate a traditional calculator model and I regularly use them.

To give some positive feedback: I like your loan calculator. That's something that could really be useful for a lot of people. I think there's still more you can do there, eg let people figure out how much credit they can afford with a given monthly payment. Take a look at traditional financial calculators like the HP 12c, they're extremely versatile in that regard.

Personally, I don't see the need for separate calculators for things like percentage increase or rounding numbers. Most of those could be combined in 2-3 apps at most, imho, scientific, financial and unit conversion. The others are really separate apps that would need a lot more functionality than the pure calculation aspect to really be useful (eg time tracking).

You can do all of those using Passkeys in Keepass, eg though KeepassXC, including import/export. However, Keepass applications have already been flagged as non-compliant for this reason. What you also currently can't do afaik is use them on mobile.

I think it's time to switch from GDP per capita to household income. You might think the two are practically the same, and globally that's true, but at the regional level there can be stark discrepancies.

One example: Ireland's GDP grew a staggering 25% in 2015 [0], mainly because Apple decided to book more of their profits there. It does lead to higher tax revenue, but creates relatively few jobs or other income there. The profits go to Apple shareholders, who mainly live outside Ireland. Household income would more adequately reflect where those benefits go than GDP.

Plus, with household income it's more natural to look at the median in addition to the mean, which is the more robust metric, statistically speaking.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

Stirrups are among the more forgivable historical inaccuracies, as it is difficult enough to find people who can both act and horse-ride with them reasonably well. Also, if the depiction of cavalry was more historically accurate it would matter a lot less.

"This is wrong" is very helpful to people who have been fooled by any of the numerous historical inaccuracies described in the OP.

Almost 10 years ago, Uber was hailed for creating consumer surplus [0] in similar studies:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2837639

Discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12478847

Who would have thought that they'd turn that research into algorithms that skim off surplus (from consumers and drivers)?

[0] Consumer surplus: roughly, the benefit of all those consumers who got a lower price than what they would have been willing to pay. Especially prevalent when there's one price for all. So the natural enemy of consumer surplus is price discrimination, where suppliers try to extract close to the maximum amount they're willing to pay from each consumer.

The GP says it's baffling to combine sports teams with academic institutions, and you're saying it's not because those that do tend to have smaller endowments? Talk about a non sequitur

> “You’re [X]?! The quantum physicist who’s always getting into arguments on the Internet, and who’s essentially always right, but who sustains an unreasonable amount of psychic damage in the process?”

> “Yes,” I replied, not bothering to correct the “physicist” part.

Didn't read much beyond that part. He'll fit right in with the rationalist crowd...

The exact schedules will vary, but typically they'll have full days of either school or work. They're definitely employed and work there. Those are real jobs, even if they're not full-time. Not all adults work full-time either.

> As a German, I'm dying to hear more about these 15-18 year olds illegally employed in finance! Shouldn't they be finishing high school (18) or Abitur (19)? I'm not kidding, please tell me more about these 15 year olds employed in finance, in particular!

It seems that you are oddly unfamiliar with the German apprenticeship system, for a German. Nothing illegal here: https://www.sparkasse.de/karriere/schueler-und-schulabgaenge...

For a lot of eg security-related applications where you want random numbers you don't want them to be publicly known. I wonder whether there are any risks to a naive approach of turning those numbers into private random numbers, eg hashing them together with a secret? Should you rotate the secret?

It would be interesting if the researchers could clarify this before people start rolling their own solutions.